A church in Fuerth, Bavaria recently held an experimental service almost entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, asked the believers to rise from their pews. With an expressionless face and monotonous voice, the chatbot then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning. The 40-minute service, including the sermon, prayers, and music, was created by ChatGPT and a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna named Jonas Simmerlein. Simmerlein requested for Psalms to be included in the service, as well as prayers and a blessing at the end. The entire service was “led” by four different avatars on the screen—two young women and two young men. At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter as when it used platitudes and told the churchgoers with a deadpan expression that in order “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly.”
Simmerlein clarified that his intention was not to replace religious leaders with AI-powered chatbots. Instead, he sees the use of AI as a way to help them with their everyday work in their congregations. However, the experimental church service also showed the limits to implementing artificial intelligence in church or religion. There was no real interaction between the believers and the chatbot, which wasn’t able to respond to the laughter or other reactions as a human pastor would have been able to do. “The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning,” Simmerlein said. “Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation.”
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